Environmental Justice Caucus Professional Development Session: Publishing in Environmental Justice, Naturecultural Studies, and Environmental Humanities, Part II: Scholars’ Perspectives Roundtable

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

This professional development roundtable responds to the conference call for inquiry into “Late-Stage American Empire” by convening a roundtable discussion of publishing across environmental justice, climate justice, decolonization, naturecultural studies, American studies, and the environmental humanities. This roundtable includes a balance of established and emerging scholars, including folks who have worked on special issues, edited collections, scholarly journals, collaborative projects, fellowship and grant projects, and traditional monographs. The fields of study represented on the roundtable are capacious, drawing scholars from multiple intersections of Native and Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latinx/e/a Studies, Feminist and Queer ecologies, critical ethnic studies, literary studies, political ecology, etc. Across these engagements, the scholars in this roundtable will help us think through forms of study, solidarity, and publishing that challenge the academy’s history of extraction by practicing new models of interdisciplinary engagement anchored in relations with each other and the living world. Along with presenting a roundtable discussion, this professional development session will include a breakout session where attendees can ask questions and receive coaching from roundtable participants

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Daniel Lanza Rivers, San Jose State University

Panelists

• Maria Celleri, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

• Xan S Chacko, Brown University

• Stefanie K. Dunning, University of Rochester

• Lisa Fink, Michigan State University

• Christina Gerhardt

• Gina Starblanket, University of Victoria

• Kim D Hester Williams, Sonoma State University

Biographical Information

Maria Celleri
María Célleri (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research expertise includes Latin American & Caribbean/Latinx studies, cultural studies, and decolonial feminism. Her forthcoming monograph focuses on the Virgen del Panecillo monument in Quito, Ecuador, and how the Virgen functions to solidify longstanding national narratives around race and gender and acts as a strategic site of decolonial future imaginaries. A revised book chapter on feminist struggles for reproductive rights in the Andes and a co-authored piece on displacement and activism in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. She is also the co-leader of Latino Outdoors-Baltimore, for which she creates diverse and accessible outdoor recreational programming. She is an avid hiker, camper, and rock climber. An article about what it means to organize outdoor programming for Latines that is accessible, intersectional, and community-oriented while also being attuned to regional specificities is forthcoming in a special issue of Latinx outdoor recreation in Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal.

Xan Sarah Chacko
Xan Sarah Chacko (she/her) is Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Brown University. A feminist science studies scholar of the history and practices of natural science, Chacko teaches courses in environmental humanities and lab studies, administers the undergraduate degree in STS, and serves on the editorial team of feminist STS journal Catalyst: Feminism, theory, technoscience. Her research complicates the taken-for-grantedness of scientific knowledge production to argue for a feminist re-envisioning of science that is committed to justice. Chacko is co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman and Littlefield; 2023) and a special issue of Catalyst on the “Domestication of War” (Vol. 9 No. 1. 2023). Xan’s writing has appeared in Isis, LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, History of Science, Centaurus, American Anthropologist, Agronomy, Continuum, Feminist Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and CAFE: Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment. Her current book project, The Last Seed: Botanic Futures in Colonial Legacies, studies the history and practices of seed banking to demonstrate how concepts like ‘biodiversity’ and ‘food security’ are evoked in a neoliberal era to enable the continuation of extractive colonial practices like plant collecting.

Stefanie Dunning
Stefanie K. Dunning is the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies at the University of Rochester, director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute, and Professor of Black Studies and English. She is a graduate of Spelman College and the University of California, Riverside; and she is a Ford Fellow. She was the 2021-2022 Altman Humanities Center Co-Fellow at Miami University, curating a year-long program on Race and Racism. She has published articles in MELUS, Studies in the Fantastic, African American Review, and several volumes and anthologies. Among her publications are her first book, Queer in Black and White: Same Sex Desire and African American Culture which was published in 2009 by Indiana University Press and her most recent publications include the book Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) and a podcast, called Black to Nature: The Podcast. Both her podcast and published work has been highlighted and featured on the Yale Climate Connections publication, the Conversations in Atlantic Theory podcast, and she has been a featured scholar at the Chautauqua Institution. She also recently guest edited a special edition of Studies in the Fantastic on the genre of black horror and is currently at work on two books: a literary biography of Wallace Thurman and a monograph titled Other/Worldly: A Black Ecology of Outer Space, which examines Afrofuturist texts that highlight modalities of change and world-making in the context of space travel.

Lisa Fink
Lisa Fink (they, she) lives and works as a guest on Dena’ina Ełnena in Anchorage, Alaska. A poet, translator, and scholar of environmental humanities and political ecology, they are a National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow. Their current book project is a critical race and Indigenous studies account of environmental discourse, thought, and practice concerning species invasion as it intersects with anti-immigrant, anti-Asian, and anti-Indigenous discourse, and abolitionist forms of environmental thought and practice that emerge in contestation. Their writing can be found in American Quarterly, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Boston Review, Ecotone, Park Science, and Humanities (among others).

Christina Gerhardt
Christina Gerhardt (she/her) is the Leir Chair of Comparative Literature at Clark University and co-founder of the Environmental Humanities at Clark; former Barron Professor of Environmental Humanities at the High Meadows Environment Institute at Princeton University (2021-2022); and a permanent Senior Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously. Professor Gerhardt has been awarded fellowships by the Fulbright Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, and held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University. She is also an environmental journalist. Her writing has been published (under “Tina Gerhardt”) in The Guardian, Grist, The Nation, Orion and Sierra Magazine, among other venues. She is Editor-in-Chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. She is the author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, published by the University of California Press and named one of the “Best Popular Science Books of 2023” by the New Scientist, called “a work of art” by the LA Times and a Silver Medal Award winner for both the Nautilus Book Award and the California Book Award.

Daniel Lanza Rivers
Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) is an Associate Professor of American Studies & Literature at San José State University, where they coordinate the certificate in environmental humanities and teach courses in transnational and decolonial American studies, environmental studies, literature, and queer and trans studies. Daniel’s current book project, California Futures, explores naturecultural entanglements between practices of environmental speculation and commercial extraction across California’s colonial history. Along with mapping histories of colonial ecological violence, California Futures queries radical, dissident, and decolonial archives that locate environmental justice and land return as rallying points for the creation of feminist, queer, Indigenous, anticolonial, Black, Latine, and anti-white supremacist futures. Daniel’s writing has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Women’s Studies, Terrain.org, The San Francisco Chronicle, Joyland, Apogee, Bay Area News Matters, Sex Change and the City (forthcoming from GirlDad Press) and Writing the Golden State: the New Literary Terrain of California, among others. A Lambda Literary Fellow in Creative Nonfiction in 2024, Daniel is also at work on a collection of essays that uses archival research, science writing, and the lyric essay to explore, queer, trans, and neurodivergent folks’ relationships with each other and the living world.

Gina Starblanket

Gina Starblanket is an associate professor in the School of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. She is Cree/Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4. Dr. Starblanket studies Indigenous–settler political relations with a specific focus on Indigenous politics in the prairies, the politics of treaty implementation and Indigenous movements towards social and political transformation. Professor Starblanket is co-editor of the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAIS) and is the author of important sole and co-authored interventions theorizing relational responsibilities to one another and to the land, including the 3rd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Fernwood Press, 2024), Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial (ARP, 2020) and the fifth and sixth edition of Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (OUP, 2019 and 2025).

Kim Hester-Williams
Kim D. Hester Williams is professor of English and American Multicultural Studies at CSU - Sonoma State. She additionally serves as affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies. Dr. Hester Williams is co-editor of Racial Ecologies, a critical ethnic studies collection on the intersection of racialization and ecological crisis, published by the University of Washington Press in 2018. The volume includes a chapter that she authored, “Earthseeds of Change: Post-Apocalyptic Mythmaking, Race, and Ecology in The Book of Eli and Octavia Butler’s Womanist Parables.” Her most recent publication is a co-authored essay with LeiLani Nishime, “Familial and Communal Histories as Environmental Care Work,” published in Environmental Communication in December 2023. Dr. Hester Williams has published essays on the representation of race, gender, and economy in media, popular culture, and film, including an essay, “Mother Sister’s Cry: Spike Lee’s ‘Speech Sounds’ in the Anthropocene age of Black Lives Matter” that was published in the South African and American Studies Journal, Safundi, in 2019 and a critical review of Jordan Peele’s film, Us, entitled “Black Radical Impulse, Self-Reflexivity, and Gothic Landscapes of Nature and Difference in Jordan Peele’s Us, for the Winter 2021 edition of the journal, Gothic Nature. Dr. Hester Williams has served on the editorial board of the Genders journal and a consultant for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She is currently guest editing a special edition of Gothic Nature on the topic of “Decolonizing the EcoGothic” which will be published in February 2025. In 2024, Dr. Hester Williams was appointed as co-editor of the Legacy journal. Her current book monograph examines the hyper-consumption and romanticizing of Black expressive culture and its dialectical relationship to discourses and practices of anti-Blackness that, ultimately, reveal whiteness as racial terror and crisis.